Outtakes: A Mount Maunganui marvel by Evan Mayo

Mount Maunganui is one of New Zealand's favourite summer destinations, but when Heather Coyne and Mark Winter asked Hamilton-based architect Evan Mayo of Architecture Bureau to design them a holiday home there, they never envisaged they'd end up moving there permanently. 

It's a credit to Evan's smart design that they did so. Heather and Mark found the single-level holiday house he created so pleasing that they decided to move there full-time. The main house, beautifully photographed by Florence Noble, features a handsome, compact, three-bedroom structure with high ceilings made from hoop-line plywood. Importantly, the property's original cottage was retained on the site, and now doubles as a home office and spare bedroom. It's visible in the right of the photo below, and is one of the few original dwellings remaining on the Mount Maunganui beachfront promenade.

The tyre-swing that hangs from the pohutukawa down the drive and the central decking between the original property and the modern building (below) perfectly respond to the brief of this holiday home being "a place for the kids to grow up" says Mark.

The view from the kitchen cleverly looks over the home's living and decking area so Heather and Mark can keep an eye on their grandchildren at play (below) and enjoy the sunshine when they feel like it.

The extended eave over the deck offers shade and shelter (below), while the deck integrates well with the surrounding landscaping, which expertly manages the transition from the lower-level carport to the home itself. Inside, clerestory windows on the home's western elevation allow good ventilation and afternoon light.

The living area features the Focus 'Ergofocus' fireplace designed by Dominique Imbert, which warms the area on cold winter nights. The pendant lights above the kitchen bench were purchased on TradeMe.

 

The shot below shows the connection between the open-plan living space and main bedroom and en suite. Two additional smaller bedrooms are tucked into the home's western side, but when no visitors are staying, the home feels like a simple apartment for Heather and Mark.

The retention of the original cottage (below) is a sympathetic masterstroke. On a street where a number of homes look like they're on steroids, Evan's sensitive design retains something of the diminutive age-old scale of this beachside community, as well as providing privacy for Heather and Mark's new home.

  

The following photograph is from just across the road from the house, with Mount Maunganui beach's wild-daisy covered dunes extending into the distance. 

 

Outtakes: A beautiful beach getaway by Min Hall

It's that time of year when we start fantasising about taking a break - not an all-action holiday, but something quiet and wintry that mostly involves reading books around a fire. This home by architect Min Hall in Golden Bay seems to fit that description perfectly.

First, the plan, which is interesting in its own right. Min broke the house into modules designed to fit around the trees. There is one living and dining area, another wing for the main bedroom and the third for guests (below). The sea is on the eastern boundary, or right-hand side of the plan.

The photograph below (all these images were taken by Paul McCredie) shows the approach to the house, where cars pull up to the back of the house. Min designed the home's modules to be clad in different materials to break up the bulk of the building even further. Covered walkways connect the home's different parts.

Inside, the house has elegantly simple aesthetics - only two pieces of art feature in the property, so not to distract from its surroundings -  yet there are some unique design elements which define the house.

The box window in the dining area (below) is likened to a museum display and exaggerates the feeling of looking inwards through the forest. A Simon James-designed 'Hawk' table accompanies seating by Marc Zuckerman and a smaller rustic 'Uma' bench by Chad Heays.

Huge folding doors off the living area allow a large panorama of the bay (below).

Perhaps even better is the view from the main bedroom where, at high tide, water gently laps on the shore just a few metres away. This is the kind of thing real holidays are made of - when staying in bed seems like one of the best ways to enjoy the views.

Home of the Year 2013: our new cover

We're delighted to announce that the winner of the Home of the Year 2013 is the beautiful Headland house on Waiheke Island by Stevens Lawson Architects. 

A photo by Mark Smith of the home's main bedroom, located in one of its three curvaceous pods, graces the cover of our special Home of the Year issue, which is on newsstands from Thursday April 4. 

Also in our Home of the Year issue: five amazing finalist homes in Auckland, Whanganui, Nelson, Christchurch and Wanaka. It's a great diversity of design which we're very proud to showcase for you in print for the first time. 

We'll post a short web film of the winning home on this site soon - stay tuned!  

This is the fourth time Stevens Lawson have won the Home of the Year award. Our congratulations to Nicholas Stevens, Gary Lawson and their team, who collect the $15,000 first prize. And, as always, our thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for their ongoing support of the Home of the Year award.

Outtakes: Hut on Sleds by Ken Crosson

In our April/May issue, we introduced you to a tiny house, "Hut on Sleds" on the Coromandel Peninsula at Whangapoua Beach designed by Ken Crosson(below). This diminutive, charming holiday home was a finalist in our Home of the Year award 2012, and subsequently shortlisted in the World Architecture Festival's awards. It is such a cleverly built and elegant bach that we wanted to show you more of Jackie Meiring's terrific photographs of it. 

"It had to be a de-mountable house," explains Ken, required by the council because it is located within an erosion zone on the Coromandel coast. Measuring a mere 40 square metres, the house rests on two thick wooden 'sleds' that allows it to be dragged anywhere once uncoupled from power and wastewater and untied from the concrete pads beneath the sleds. It lends an entirely different meaning to the idea of moving house.

The bach has been designed to close up against elements: with doors and shutters closed (as in the photo above) it is truly hermetic to rain and wind gusts. But when the sun is shining, the house opens up to let the outside in (below).

Beyond the demands of its setting, the bach had to fit its clients' desires as well. "It was all about examining what was the real essence of a bach versus a beach house," says Ken. "They wanted something small and experiental. It's tiny, so the challenge was to make it as bachy as possible, and not waste any space in doing that."

That's why there's an intentionally enforced proximity imposed on its occupants : a compact front living and kitchen area flows through a rear bunkroom for the owners' three young children, and the main bedroom is up a ladder from the living room, sharing the same view as downstairs through the huge glass doors.

In the main bedroom (above), there are warm shades of macrocarpa joinery and a remarkable attention to storage detail. Downstairs, each of the childrens' beds (below) has their own storage spaces ("secret cubby holes" says Ken), their own lights and windows. The walls themselves double as floor-to-ceiling shelf space that Ken hopes will accumulate the personal histories of the occupants.

The ladder you use to reach the main bedroom also brings you to the roof terrace, which catches rainwater for the gravity tanks behind (below), and affords great views of the beach and the sunsets.

Inside, there are intentional references made by Ken and his clients to the campground, such as the deliberately rudimentary tap and shower fittings. As Ken says: "You know, where you fill your bucket. It's that kind of idea"

To one side, a second entrance to the house via the shower and bathroom, allows occupants to shower straight away after going to the beach (below).

"It's kind of like a tent," says Ken about the bach's structure. "It's dramatic and vertical. The tent flap [the huge macrocarpa front shutter] is that big door that opens up - a big gesture that embraces the view."

The Adirondacks - a small-world story

How's this for a charming small-world story? This week we received an email from Christina Kaiser, an expat American who has been living in New Zealand for the last 13 years. Christina wrote to us because she remembers hiking, and skiing and camping beside Raquette Lake in New York State's Adirondacks Mountains, the same location as the beautiful cabin photographed by Emily Andrews in our current issue. 

(To jog your memories, here's one of Emily's photographs featuring expat New Zealander Adrian van Schie, who designed and built the cabin, and his sons Huck and Tana. Alexandra Perce, Adrian's wife and the boys' mother, is just out of frame). 

Christina Kaiser's connection to the Adirondacks and Raquette Lake runs deeper than the aforementioned childhood memories: her father, architecture professor Harvey Kaiser, wrote The Great Camps of the Adirondacks, probably the definitive tome on this important aspect of the area's history. In the mid-1800s, wealthy families from New York would come upstate for the summer and stay in tents or compounds made up of structures that, even when they became elaborate, still aspired to a type of rusticity. (Adrian and Alexandra's cabin shown above was built recently, but it emulates the rusticity of the buildings in the Great Camps nearby.) 

Christina writes:

[Dad's] book helped popularise the term 'great camp' and drew an incredible amount of attention to these historic places and their need for preservation. Without planning it, he became an expert on the great camps and local celebrity in the largest state park in the country. Thirty years later, he is still regularly asked to give talks about the great camps. 

Sam Eichblatt's story for us touches on the way preservation efforts of the camps were galvanised in the mid-1970s. Harvey Kaiser's important role in these efforts came about almost accidentally, Christina writes:

  

When Syracuse University announced plans to sell Camp Sagamore, my dad was an architecture professor and a Senior Vice President at the university. According to him, he "turned up at the auction in September 1976 and while standing there, as an Adirondack novice from Brooklyn, wondered who built the place, why did they build it out of logs down this 5-mile road from the nearest highway, and so on. When I couldn't find any answers in print - virtually zero was ever published about the camps - I decided there should be some advocacy voice to bring to the public's attention these rustic architecture masterpieces. So I researched, wrote, took pictures, and found a good publisher."

The rest is history, as 40,000 copies of the book are in print, and the preservation efforts it helped inspire have ensured many of the camps have survived. We're delighted Christina got in touch, and that our story prompted this connection with Harvey. We're looking forward to the new edition of his book (due in late 2014 or early 2015), and we applaud the way his work turned out to be instrumental in preserving the unique buildings of this area. We'll end this post with a photo Christina sent us of her and Harvey at a signing of the book at Lake Placid 1982 or 1983. 

Meet the Architects: Auckland, October 31

We'd like to invite you to our special 'Meet the Architects' evening we're holding in conjunction with our Home of the Year partners Altherm Window Systems in Auckland on Wednesday October 31st (yes, we know it's Halloween; no, the architects won't be spooky).

The details:

MEET THE ARCHITECTS
6PM-7.30PM, WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 31
GEYSER, 105 PARNELL ROAD, AUCKLAND

Entry is free, but please register to attend by emailing Gabrielle Lourens at glourens@acpmedia.co.nz 

We'll serve drinks at 6pm, then you'll be able to hear HOME editor Jeremy Hansen in conversation with the following excellent architects, who will talk about recent and future projects. The whole event will be a little over an hour long, is open to everyone. It promises to be a fascinating evening.

1. ANDREW PATTERSON, PATTERSON ASSOCIATES 
Andrew has won more architectural awards than we can count, including one for the amazing Mai Mai house (on p.84 of our current issue) and another for Geyser, the Parnell building where we're holding our event (below, photographed by Simon Devitt).

2. DAVE STRACHAN, STRACHAN GROUP ARCHITECTS
Dave is an accomplished architect, former builder, and teacher at Auckland's Unitec, where the bach he created in collaboration with last year's architecture students was a finalist in our 2012 Home of the Year award (below, photographed by Simon Devitt). He'll talk about this year's student project (a social housing initiative) plus a number of the other fascinating projects and beautiful homes his firm has under development.  

 

3. LANCE AND NICOLA HERBST, HERBST ARCHITECTS

The husband-and-wife architecture team will talk about the development of 'Under Pohutukawa', the unforgettable 2012 Home of the Year (below, photographed by Patrick Reynolds), as well as their approach to light, space and craft. 

Please join us for what we know is going to be a fantastic event. We look forward to seeing you there.

NZ's Architecture van Brandenburg in China

In our current issue, we feature the remarkable story of architect Fred van Brandenburg and his son Damien of Architecture van Brandenburg, who are designing the new Shenzhen headquarters of Marisfrolg, one of China's biggest fashion labels. Below is a shot of the first stage of the building under construction. (It's expected to be completed in three years).

The inspiration for the building's organic forms come from none other than the late Antoni Gaudi, designer of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia cathedral. Fred, who has designed luxury lodges including Huka Lodge and Wharekauhau, decided after seeing Gaudi's buildings that he wanted to make a complete change in the way he designed buildings. "I decided I was going to do sculptural architecture by adapting philosophies [Gaudi] espoused and applying them to contemporary architecture," he says.

Above: An image from a recent advertising campaign by Marisfrolg, using the headquarters' partially completed structure as a backdrop.

The Marisfrolg headquarters job came about after the company's owners visited Fred's office in Lake Hayes, Central Otago, after staying in some of his lodge designs. He told them he was no longer interested in designing that type of building, and they said they would be in touch. About a year and a half later they did so, asking him to come and see their site in Shenzhen in southern China. Fred couldn't remember them, but their seriousness and the scale of the project got his attention: 75,000 square metres, including a catwalk and function area for launching collections, design offices, manufacturing and warehousing and a 50-room boutique hotel for the label's clients. Through their intepreter, Marisfrolg's owners asked for the building to be soaring but unostentatious. "I then realised this was going to be big" said Fred. The final direction was "Design first, budget second."

 

Above and below: Conceptual models of the Marisfrolg building, inspired by Fred's newfound love of organic forms.

As part of their (very loose) brief, Marisfrolg's owners showed Fred a video of a recent Marisfrolg collection with images of birds in flight and autumnal scenes. "I explained that I was inspired by forms found in nature and it all gelled very quickly," Fred says. Damien had just graduated in architecture from Auckland's Unitec, and moved to Dunedin to work on the project full-time (the duo set up an office there because of its proximity to the "brains trust" of 3D-modelling experts at Otago Polytechnic).

Above: More views of models of the complex in Architecture van Brandenburg's Dunedin office, 
the two colour images photographed by Graham Warman. Damien van Brandenburg is in the shot above.

Fred and Damien have never been told the budget of the project, but nor have their clients ever wavered in their commitment to fulfilling their architect's vision. They're already talking about potential projects with other Chinese developers, but for the moment, Fred says the main focus is on successfully completing the Marisfrolg headquarters. "There are people who are interested in us in China but you can imagine they're reticent and seeing how things pan out [with this project] he says. Once it is, you can easily imagine plenty more attention coming the van Brandenburgs' way.

Outtakes: The Onemana Bach by SGA Architects and Unitec students

Our current issue features a short Q+A with architect Dave Strachan of SGA Architects, talking to him about his work with students at Unitec to design and build social housing in collaboration with Auckland's VisionWest.

This isn't the first time Dave and his students have worked together to build something remarkable - last year he and his team designed and built a thrifty bach at Onemana Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula that was a finalist in our 2012 Home of the Year award. (These photographs are by Simon Devitt).

Dave and his students at Auckland’s Unitec School of Architecture were assisted on this project by architect Marshall Cook and builder John Cocks. As a result, all of these students can claim they will leave university with real-world architectural experience: as well as collaborating on the design of the bach, they built it at the Unitec campus before it was trucked to its site on the Coromandel Peninsula.

This is a good point at which to add context to Dave’s remark in our original article accompanying the Home of the Year issue. In it, we quoted Dave as making an unflattering remark about architects in general, but what he was really trying to say was that there is a perception that architects are regarded this way, and that the way students work with tradespeople in this exercise helps to close the gap between architects and the professionals they collaborate with. Our apologies to Dave for allowing this remark to run in the magazine in a way that made it seem like he was slagging off his own profession, when in reality he holds architects and architecture in the highest esteem. 

 

Above: Andrew Morrison relaxes on the deck in a cane-swing chair while Shiree and their daughters Rubie and Billie hang 

out in the kitchen. Morgan Cronin from Cronin Kitchens advised the students on building the cabinetry.

Above: The living room opens out to decks on both sides. Former Unitec student 
Tim Webber designed the table to match the Morrisons' Ikea chairs.

Part of Dave’s mission in leading this project at Unitec is to encourage productive working relationships and good communication between these students when they graduate and the tradespeople they will work with on future architectural projects. Building the bach was a vital part of this process. The students, Dave says, might say, “oh, we just want a nice flat floor to go through there – well that’s wonderful, but how the hell do you do that, to document it and then build it? That makes it a useful part of architectural education”.

Dave was a builder before he became an architect and has the deepest of respect for both professions, as well as a keen awareness of how poor detailing and communication can compromise a project. “Design is what [students] are taught to do,” Dave says. “It’s what most schools of architecture focus on. But a lot of design decisions are made during documentation – everyone thinks it’s the boring bit, but really it’s very much about trying to keep the integrity of the design idea you had at the start.”

Above: The ultimate in indoor/outdoor flow: a floor that continues almost seamlessly from the kitchen out to the deck. 
The deck chairs, covered by Shiree, are from Nest.

Above: A view of the dining area opening onto the second deck. In the background, the barbecue from 
The BBQ Factory echoes the strobe-like effect from the slatted roof.

Above: The barbecue deck is also the perfect place to relax in front of a little fire and watch the starry sky after sunset.

Above: Billie and Rubie playing in the living area with the windows panels drawn back to enjoy the sun. 
Below: Dave and some of the members of Studio 19, his student design team.